Not all those who wander are lost

How Deep are Your Claw Marks?

How deep are your claw marks?

The only advice I can give is to dig in your claws as little as possible. Because you’re going to be dragged into the truth; the only question is how deep are the claw marks you leave in the ground as you get dragged :) And you will leave some claw marks because everybody leaves some claw marks; everybody holds on. Everybody holds on but the less you hold on, the easier and quicker it goes.

~ Adyashanti

I really enjoyed listening in on Adya’s satsang live online tonight. He’s such a wonderful teacher, and I’m immensly grateful for how the essence of his words always touches an intimate chord in me. It has that unmistakeable scent of affectionate, fierce grace… makes me feel as if I’m being wrapped up in a unyielding but comforting embrace. I can feel my claws retracting slightly.

One thing that resonated for me in a particularly strong way was a quote that he shared, a few words by Nisargadatta Maharaj:

Just keep in mind the feeling “I am,” merge in it, till your mind and feeling become one. By repeated attempts you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling “I am.”

You will stumble on the right balance. This bit intrigues me. Balance. By accident. Balance will find you. It suggests that balance is not something you can figure out. It’s an excellent reminder, because I do realise that’s a belief that is still with me. I’m still trying to figure out how to create or find some sort of balance in my life. I must have failed and given up on it a thousand times, but apparently I’ve bounced back only to try again a thousand and one times. Knowing fully well that I’ve never had and never will have control over things, I’m still trying to reclaim the control. Funny, isn’t it?

I love listening to Adya talking about the warmth and affection in the middle of presence, but it also makes me acutely aware of how different it sounds to what I’m experiencing right now. Sure, I’ve had plenty of glimpses and whiffs of it but there’s still this sense of… distance or separation. It’s as if I’m only in touch with the “intellectual” part of it. From the neck down I’m living a completely different truth; I’m watching my body contracting and desperately trying to protect itself, shying away from what is. And yet my whole being is yearning for that warmth of awareness, a sense of intimacy and closeness. Yearning with a fiery passion. And fear… What is it that is still being believed? By whom? What is it that stops “me” from simply resting in the presence of my own being? That felt sense of affectionate awareness is clearly missing and I really want to understand why.

This resting space feels to me a bit like a place I can visit whenever I want to, and even though I can’t imagine myself ever wanting to leave, I always find myself at some point having already left anyway. It’s as if I’m in the sea desperately trying to get below the surface in order to avoid the rough waves, but since I’m wearing a life-jacket – to keep myself safe, obviously! – no matter how much effort I’m putting into immersing myself into the depths, I keep floating, popping right back up to the surface again.
But then again, as I’m writing this I can’t really say that’s true either. It’s more like I’m watching these ideas simply floating round. If I look closely I’m not really or consciously making an effort to avoid what is. Not like that, anyway. I’m not even sure if I’m any different from the water, or the presence in which all of this seems to be taking place. There is still sometimes an urge to hide, fight, to kick and scream and to DO SOMETHING!!, but there simply isn’t enough energy or momentum behind it, it just doesn’t happen. At least not on a conscious level… which  makes me think of something I read recently:

Different emotions provide different challenges, but all emotions can prove difficult because emotions are invested with energies that are more primal than thought – a kind of instinctual power that can hold a strong ego focus as well. The intellectual mind cannot master emotion for this reason; a deeper feeling and awareness, moment by moment, is required for this to happen.

~ From ‘Inner Tantric Yoga’ by David Frawley

I do know how to drop into that infinite space of not knowing, of stillness and peace. However, as real as the sense of being that is when “I’m there”, just as real is the sense of separation when I believe I’m not. Trust is there, trust is not there. It feels as if I’m just going round in circles… but there are some loose ends sticking out here and there, and I’m willing to keep pulling them just to see what will unravel. I believe it’s the mind that shuts the heart down, closes it… and every single belief that gets untangled from what is seems to release a bit more space, bring a bit more ease to the heart.

I’ve heard Adya and other teachers talk about it so many times, and I’ve had the experience/realization myself too, that it isn’t something you make happen. It’s something that you open to or relax into. It’s something you stop with. I know I won’t find it if I seek it, and I can see that it’s the seeking itself that makes me believe I don’t already have (am!) it. So why does all this keep starting itself up again?

Here’s another few quotes from Adya’s satsang tonight that caught my attention:

Grace is something your ‘me’ can’t make happen.

Grace is always here. The question is, are we in a receptive mood?

When you don’t seem open-hearted, there’s something going on in your mind that makes it seem like you’re not available.

Sometimes you have to get more intimate with the patterns of thinking.

This is not just an inside deal…. Awareness spills over into your life.

To the universe it doesn’t make any sense to say ‘it should be or shouldn’t be.’ To the universe it just is.

The one that holds a belief is just another belief.

No matter how much me-stuff that’s going on, awareness is still not caught in it. Feel it. Sense how this awareness effortlessly holds all this in great warmth and with a certain sense of affection.

What would be the wise and compassionate place to respond from? What would be the response not coming from fear? [...] Just do the next obvious thing. [...] There can be no guarantees in life. You can’t know with any certainty what to do. Just feel the way life is flowing. There’s a sense of knowing. It’s more about the obvious thing than the right thing. [...] It can spook you if it only lands in your mind. Take it deeper. [...] Life is a game and we’re pretending to be in control of it.

The following transcript is also from a satsang session with Adya. It’s not the one from tonight’s talk, but I thought I’d share it anyway since it touches upon much of the same stuff. What he says here really speaks to me in so many ways… I especially love the part about claw marks, it made me smile ♥

Questioner: So my ego has been saying I’m in trouble and that it’s your fault (laughter).

Adyashanti: Ah, it’s part of the teacher thing; everything’s my fault.

Q: I’m making a little joke here.

A: I know.

Q: So the trouble is that since I’m coming to these retreats, I have a growing feeling of not knowing. It’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

A: Don’t worry, it will only get worse (laughter). Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I told you this teaching steals everything you have.

Q: It translates these days now into, I used to get off on talking to large crowds and being well-known. I used to get off on getting big advances for books, I used to get off on all sorts of things like that which I felt brought money into the bank and gave me a nice life and now it just seems to be drifting away, unimportant, unmotivating. Like why do another book and why give another talk, why all this struggle in the marketplace to make your place, create more products and to make more money? It just seems pointless.

A: Well, your personal self is dissolving. That’s what happens when you personal self dissolves; personal motivations dissolve.

Q: But how am I going to survive, how is money going to come into the bank account?

A: It’s too late (laughter).

Q: You mean I’m going to end up a bag lady (laughs)?

A: No, no, no. The divine is much more compassionate than that. It’s love. But it’s not going to give you any guarantees. Your personal self is dissolving; that’s obvious. This is part of the dissolving process. Personal motivations disappear and sometimes the perks that come along with them, as well as the painful elements. The painful elements disappear but what we often don’t count on is the perks disappear. There’s both, right? It’s not all bad. It’s not all samsara. There’s the illusion of happiness in samsara, right (laughter)?

Q: (laughing) It’s not funny (laughter)!

A: They’re laughing because they know what you’re talking about. They’ve either been through it, are going through or will be going through it soon (laughter). So I can’t give you any comfort except the more you let go, the faster you move through. There is another life on the other side. It may not be big, exciting or extraordinarily successful, but it might be bigger and more successful; you never know. The nice thing is, you won’t care.

Q: Yeah, I have a taste of that too.

A: Sure, that’s what’s in there. The mind sees this as disorienting and alarming but underneath that, is what knows.

Q: Yeah, that’s present too, that love is growing; there is unexpressible beauty of feeling guided, that the divine, if I just go like this (makes hand gesture), everything is given.

A: It carries you along, that’s right, everything is given. But it won’t look like it did, it won’t.

Q: That’s the thing.

A: The only advice I can give is to dig in your claws as little as possible. Because you’re going to be dragged into the truth; the only question is how deep are the claw marks you leave in the ground as you get dragged (laughter). And you will leave some claw marks because everybody leaves some claw marks; everybody holds on. Nobody is a perfect saint in that regard. Everybody holds on but the less you hold on, the easier and quicker it goes.

Q: Hmmm. I hear you and in a concrete and practical way, how to deal with that place of not knowing and what life presents? How to know whether it is better to follow what the agent is asking, to make a film, do a book or not do anything or go sit on your ass in some zen monastery? How do you know?

A: Oh, it’s very easy, very simple to know. The first thing you have to do is admit that you don’t know the right thing to do. You don’t know, cannot know and will not know. In most situations, God is not going to tap you on the shoulder and say, “sweetheart, do this.” Every once in a while it will work out that way but you will live the majority of your life in, “you don’t know, you can’t know, and you won’t know.”

Q: You mean it never ends, this kind of not knowing phase?

A: It gets worse (laughter).

Q: (laughs) You look pretty happy for someone who doesn’t know so there must be some good in it.

A: Of course because you realize it doesn’t matter. Now, what I’m telling you, the truth isn’t in the words. So what I’m saying isn’t the truth; I’m just pointing you in the direction of the truth. What I’m trying to get across is that when you let yourself face your experience … Right now you have decisions where you don’t know what the right thing to do is. Apparently you can’t know right now. That’s your experience. If you were to face that fully, completely, you’d know, but you wouldn’t know here (points to his head). That’s not where you’ll know. Your mind won’t know with certainty because that’s not how the divine reality works. That’s how ego reality works. “I know this is what I want to do; I know this is right.” That’s where ego works, from the head. Divine reality isn’t knowing up here (points to head). When you face the fact that you can’t know, then you feel this, it’s a movement. It’s like an inner leaning; it leans this way; it leans that way. And where it leans, you go. But if your mind says, “do I know that’s the right way?” the answer is always no. Is that the right way? You can’t know. But when you always facing that, then you’re sensitive enough, you feel the lean and you just follow the lean.

You see; because the truth does not insist. It does not announce itself generally. It just leans this way. That’s why it’s so easy for us to go in some other direction because the truth leans this way; it’s very light, like a feather; it just kind of blows this way. Whereas the mind is very heavy, “I WANT THIS.” So it’s very dense and it’s very easy to follow. When we expect the truth to be that dense and heavy-handed, we keep missing it. It’s very soft. It doesn’t need to clamor for attention. Even if you go the opposite way, guess where you’re going to end up in the long run? Exactly where that truth was going anyway. It’s going to get its way and it knows it’s going to get its way. The only question is, are you going to take a detour on the way to the truth? But it’s going to win out so it doesn’t need to insist. So let yourself feel, not just in your head, but feel your experience. “I can’t know here, I can’t know for sure because assuredness is what’s in the mind.” It’s not going to happen. You’re past that place. When you face that you can feel your body relax when you come into what’s true for you. You’re not fighting what’s true for you. Then you’ll feel the lean, soft, quiet; that’s all. You’ll get the feel.

Q: (bows)

A: This is not magic. It’s not mysterious. Sit down in a chair or on your couch and don’t make a decision when to get up and just feel. And all of sudden it will become obvious. Your body will start to move with the feeling and you’ll just be getting up. Try it sometime. It’s interesting. Spend a day like that; just feeling, not moving until you feel. If your mind is asking you, “is this the right feeling?” you’ll never get it. It’s like thirst. When you’re thirsty, you’re thirsty. That’s knowledge, that’s direct knowing. What would you say to somebody if they said, “how do I know when I’m thirsty?” Well, you’ll feel the flow of it. But if a mind was involved, the mind might even feel thirsty and the mind would go, “how do I know that that’s thirst? How do I know?” But on the inside, in quietness, thirst and reaching for the cup would be just one movement. Thirst and the cup; simple.